About the Book

Creek (or Muskogee) is a Muskogean language spoken by several thousand members of the Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole nations of Oklahoma and by several hundred members of the Seminole Tribe of Florida. This volume is the first modern grammar of Creek, compiled by a leading authority on the languages of the southern United States.

Intended for scholars, students, and Creek instructors, this reference grammar describes all the major morphological and syntactic patterns in the language. Special attention is given to pitch accent and tone, active agreement, locative prefixes, tense, aspect, and switch reference. The description covers several hundred years of documentation and draws heavily on materials written by Creek speakers. It is likely to be the definitive source on the language for years to come.

Author Bio

Jack B. Martin is an associate professor of English at the College of William and Mary. He is the coeditor of Totkv Mocvse/New Fire: Creek Folktales and the coauthor of A Dictionary of Creek/Muskogee (Nebraska 2000). Margaret McKane Mauldin is a Creek instructor at the University of Oklahoma. She was awarded the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from the College of William and Mary for her contribution to the study and preservation of the Creek language. Juanita McGirt teaches Creek in Okemah, Oklahoma, and transcribed and translated recordings and documents for this volume.

Praise

"This book is a very good, thorough reference grammar for Muskogee. . . . For those working with the language and its speakers, it is quite useful and will be an oft-referenced work."—Pamela Innes, Journal of Anthropological Research

Table of Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations and conventions

The language and its speakers

1. Creek and the Creek-speaking peoples

2. Overview of the language

3. Creek dialects and ways of speaking

Phonology

4. Phonemes

5. General phonological processes

6. The organization of phonemes into higher units

7. Stress and tone in nouns

8. Stress, tone, and grades in verbs

9. Orthography

Nouns and their modifiers

10. Nominalization

11. Compounding

12. Plural nouns

13. Size

14. Possession

15. Pronouns

16. Postpositions

17. Noun forms with adverbial function

18. Adjectival nouns (quantifiers)

Verbs and their modifiers

19. Locative prefixes

20. Agreement

21. Reflexives and reciprocals

22. Adding objects: dative and instrumental

23. Plural verbs

24. Voice alternations: middle -k-, causative -ic- and -ipeyc-

25. Impersonals

26. Degree

27. Verb forms with adverbial function

28. Aspect

29. Expressing time: tense and related notions

30. Negation

31. Mood

32. 'Be', auxiliaries, and modality

33. Numbers and quantifiers

34. Describing motion and direction

35. Existence

36. Sound-symbolic verbs

Discourse markers

37. Case and switch-reference markers

38. Focus of attention clitic

39. Referential clitic

40. Other markers

Syntax

41. Word order and basic syntax

42. Clause types

43. Interpreting pronouns, reflexives, and reciprocals

44. Style

Appendices

Appendix 1: Paradigms

Appendix 2: Texts

Appendix 3: List of common affixes

References

Index

Awards

Winner of the 2011 Leonard Bloomfield Book Award, sponsored by the Linguistic Society of America